Games

Ways Silent Hill 2 Remake Sticks To Its Survival Horror Roots

Published

34 mins ago

October 12, 2024

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Remaking the deservedly renowned and adored Silent Hill 2 is a challenge that was long thought impossible and crazy to undertake. Yet Bloober Team has risen to the challenge with quite a fantastic reimagining of the 2001 classic. One of the best survival horror games in years, which takes to heart both the survival and horror and the mechanics that define this genre.

The Biggest Changes In The Silent Hill 2 Remake

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What has changed in the past 23 years?

Furthermore, while sticking to the roots of the genre, Bloober has taken the uncanniness in design that is so central to Silent Hill 2, the familiar yet unfamiliar, to heart in the design of the remake. It has all the same clever recurring motifs with gradual alterations just as the original did, but for anyone who has already been on this journey, there are so many brilliant details that will add a very meta feeling of the uncanny. To quote the obscure but perfect adage scrawled on the windows of Neely’s Bar that sums it up, “There was a HOLE here. It’s gone now.”

Each Room Carries Its Own Atmosphere

Some Scary, Some Calming Others Dread Inducing

In a particularly outstanding showcase of the attention to detail, the Silent Hill 2 remake has many rooms with their own soundscape and distinct visual design. Just as in the original, each time a door is opened, what lies behind is often not what is expected. In the classic game, having loading screens between rooms played a large part in the startling nature of this effect, and it is very commendable that Bloober Team has managed to pull off this same effect with the natural modern caveat that such loading is no longer required.

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Whether a sudden subtle, yet noticeable, shift in the décor or a lurch as the soundtrack slides between realms or perhaps drops out completely, giving way to a heavy rattled breathing, echoing throughout the room yet without any visible source. At other times, disappearing completely. Leaving the player alone with the terrifying ambiance.

It Keeps The Player Complicit

Every Bad Choice, Every Descent, Is Up To You

A staple of almost all the classics of the survival horror genre is choice. “Will you turn the crank?”, “Will you investigate?”, “Will you go down?”. Admittedly, “Yes”, is almost always the choice that has to be made to progress, but it was clever and involving design to put the weight, and the consequence, of that choice on the player.

The remake continues this trend and even includes some neat innovations. For example, certain “investigations” of terrifying holes in walls that no person would want to explore require repeated inputs from the player to make James reach further and further.

Resources Are Limited

When To Fight, When To Heal, When To Run?

Ammunition is kept as a scant resource in the remake, much more so than in the original, which is the right decision considering the other gameplay changes. With James now able to move much more freely and dodge around the monsters, along with an aiming system that is significantly more reliant on the player’s own aiming abilities, keeping the bullets few and far between makes a lot of sense.

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By doing so, Silent Hill 2 keeps the same tension in resource management found in the original and its survival horror peers. Keeping the stress of all the little choices on the player, such as weighing up the value of ammunition or health and when and where to use them, is in keeping with survival horror tradition.

The Flashlight Is Well Balanced

A Feeble Light In The Dark Is Better Than None

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The fog and the dark are important oppressive thematic elements of Silent Hill, emblematic of secrets kept even from oneself, of what is too terrifying, too awful, to fully be revealed. Therefore, lighting in general would undoubtedly be a difficult element of the original to adapt, but the remake achieves it here with stellar results.

James Sunderland’s flashlight, which will be in near constant use, is of utmost importance to balancing the gameplay. Much like the original, it is an item the player is eternally grateful to have but forever damning its limitations, hoping it might penetrate the dark just a few feet further to reveal what they saw moving down the corridor, if indeed they saw anything at all.

The Red Squares Watch James

A Save Point That Feels Unsafe And Unsettling

Silent Hill 2 Remake Save Point, Red Square

In a modern adaption of any classic survival horror game, certain major aspects would always have to change. Much like the lauded Resident Evil 2 Remake, the fixed camera angles of old had to go, replaced by the same over-the-shoulder camera perspective.

In place of the camera acting as a sentient being watching James as he traverses its streets, the save points seem to represent this in Silent Hill 2. In place of the original game’s static red image of James’ face, each red square becomes the viewpoint for the duration of its use. Suddenly turning the camera upon James through a thick red lens, a hidden voyeur watching from the walls, the bonnet of a car, the depths of a well.